Readers' comments

Thatcher's assault on our (Welsh) coalminers and steelworks was motivated not by her hatred of our unions, but the RFU, for whom she was a mole, who saw no other way of competing with the Welsh rugby forwards without removing the industrial training grounds that made them so strong and hard. When bobby Windsor (the queen's cousin) packed down for the Viet Gwent, it was the easiest thing he had done all week. When Fran Cotton did, it was the hardest.

I am fed up of seeing this tripe consistently and unquestioningly peddled. The overall improvement on PISA tests over the last ten years has been very good, especially for poorer children.

Singapore! You have noticed that Singapore is a relatively small place of about 5m people which manages to create an immense amount of wealth through entrepot trade?

Accountability is fine, ALONG with strong cooperation, a drive to improve the quality of teaching and learning and credit where credit is due. Much of the investment Labour put in was actually not on that, but on facilities and simply bringing staff wages up to a level in keeping with the remarkably important status they should have in our society. Instead, their efforts are consistently trashed.

Also, The NFER report on PISA 2009 noted that Y11 pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were preparing for GCSEs when the rest of the world took the 2009 PISA tests. The OECD gave permission to move the tests to later in the year by which time the Y11 cohort earmarked for testing would have dispersed. The pupils assessed during November and December 2009 would have been in Year 10 when their international peers sat the papers. Pupils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who took the PISA tests in their first term of Year 11 would, therefore, have received less schooling than would have been the case if the previous cohort had taken the test during the regular PISA assessment period.

All such articles do is allow people who don't have any idea what is actually happening in schools to peddle their apparent solutions to complex at best, non-existent at worst, problems.

I suspect it will not continue to be the case - constant tinkering now leaves teachers, pupils and parents having no idea what exams are bing taken, and the latest 'curriculum for excellence' drives standards down further by reducing the number of Standard Grades that can be chosen.
The current debacle means that Scottish students face a competetive diadvantage to those educated elswhere or by the Private Sector

I'm so sure the below information is so irrelevant to that case, that I don't even know why I'm posting it:

"In 1999/2000 the gap between England and Wales was just £58 per pupil, a difference of 2 per cent. In 2009/10, after a decade of devolution, the gap was £604 per pupil, a 10.8 per cent difference and a huge increase on the previous year’s figure of £532."

To leave aside my sarcasm; if you actually think you and your associates actually this case is open and shut, you may want to reaquaint yourselves with what controls and variables are. You seem to have missed something of extreme importance.

Quoted from above, which is itself quoted from the aforementioned study: "We can rule out a number of potential causes of our findings. They cannot be explained by different resource levels or funding regimes as we control for that in our analysis."

Without resorting to similar (and needless) sarcasm, with regards the author having to 'reacquaint' themselves with variables, might I suggest you read articles more thoroughly or 'reacquaint' yourself with how statistics work. Either that or explain why the study performed its control incorrectly.

The authors compare educational attainment in England and Wales with the same currency as the league tables use: number of GCSE passes. If you have league tables then schools will not surprisingly concentrate on what they are measured on: getting as many students as possible through GCSE's.

Not a problem if you reckon the number of exam passes is the best way to measure educational standards.

Bagehot mentioned PISA which is an international comparison. Wales has always done worse than England on this measure but doesn't seem to have got relatively worse recently. PISA suggests that Wales has problems that specifically wouldn't be helped by publishing league tables. They need to look elsewhere.

Indeed I will explain how the study failed to perform its job correctly in regard.

Their summary statistics (Table 1) seem to indicate a very large difference in funding per student between the totality of matched samples which is not consistent with controlling for that statistic. In fact, the difference indicated among the match samples seems little different from the national figures.

Possibly one of the causes of this was to match a multitude of different controls at once, resulting in some items not actually being controlled for even though they are included in the study's listed controls.

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Additionally, looking at the figures 1 and 2 in the report, (Which do not control for anything) it is very coincidental how under basic observation the growing difference in both education variables mirrors the growing difference funding extremely well. (Results differences growing from approx. +1%/-2% to -10/-11% matches the funding shortfalls likewise growing from 2% to 10%) I'm not inclined to write a study, but this seems hard to write off.

So it would seem that competition sharpens up peoples' acts and in education, at least, the kids do better? Setting aside correlations between league tables and a worthwhile education (which presumably was another criterion they assessed on) what happened to University entrance over the same period ditto University grades from the relevant school cohorts? As a believer in competition to sharpen up one's act I would expect to see such correlations, but were they actually investigated? The concern is about perverse consequences being produced by reforms intended to improve education. 'Drilling to the test' and all that. The calculator effect destroying kids confidence in algebraic manipulation (cos they don't need it any more, right?). Well they do, to understand anything much in science, maths and especially programming. Programs like 'mathematica' are now destroying graduate-level peoples' ability to reason deeply about their equations. These things are OK if you only need to do the odd sum or develop the odd formula, but it's a killer if you work with either intensively. Perverse (dis)incentives, every one.

My experience as an academic in a numerate discipline was of a steady erosion in student's actual ability to do maths to the point that it imperilled their ability to perform cognate activities like computer programming. This was taking place over the same time period as this 'experiment' was being run (in fact its been going on for more than a generation), and to the best of my knowledge continues to this day. While this effect is well-charted (maths departments have been studying this erosion for decades) it is more likely that in computer programming the teaching of the National ICT programme is more responsible, by putting off the naturally skilled people we were so readily able to recruit in the 1970s and early 80s (pre NC).

When I read about the conclusions people draw from these studies there is always the question of whether the consequences are being assessed correctly. I wouldn't regard relative performance in GCSE (amid some quite famous examples of dumbing down - some years ago the maths exams were all remarked because the failure rate would have been 'politically unacceptable').

Maths and Science teaching across the UK is a disgrace, and an unremarked national scandal. These subjects don't even have maths and science-qualified teachers much of the time. The only solution is to allow the schools free to hire whom they want at whatever salary they want and then and only then will you get the right calibre of teacher into our maths and science classrooms. Just try getting that past the leftist teachers unions who are more interested in keeping their members in jobs than giving their kids a decent education. And, of course,as this article attests, they are not interested in competition. 'Prizes for all', just in case the poor dears get their feelings of self-esteem hurt.

When I graduated just one person in my graduating class of 50 (Physics) intended to train as a teacher and even he did something else in preference. Even then (1960s) I could see the crunch coming. Everything since has been like rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic. 'Dumbing down was on everyone's lips. We didn't do it (of course not) but somehow the more mathematically demanding courses were all dropped.

I often hear that Maths and Science teachers should be paid more for performing the same role and tasks as a teacher of anything else. Sorry, but this is twaddle and another example of how fly-by-night, reductionist economic models are wheeled out as 'the solution' by people who have little understanding of the actual problem.

To be blunt, I could teach the Science GCSE with my eyes closed not because it is too easy, but beacuse I am an adult with a relatively intellectual disposition and transferable teaching skills. Give me a bit of time and prep and I'm pretty confident I could teach the A Level curricula too.

The problem is not that we lack great scientists or mathematicians in teaching, but great teachers of those subjects who can combine a love for and deep understanding of their subject with an ability to create situations and methods which enable children to develop those too. They also need to be able to perform a compelling pastoral role for the children in their care. Believe it or not, this requires more than a simple ability to 'do' Science or Maths at a deep or high level. Yes, this requires intellectual capacity but it also requires the right disposition, commitment, remarkable interpersonal skills, reflective training and continual professional development. Flinging cash at academically successful and introspective individuals will not suddenly transform them into great teachers.

I have witnessed great mathematicians and scientists who were absolutely horrific at teaching and had no love for the trade itself. This was because they had so much 'deep' understanding that why could not understand why a child could not 'get it'. As a child it would make no difference to me if they were being paid more, but if would if they couldn't teach.

There are other ways of raising the status of a job than simply by paying more.

In this blog, our Bagehot columnist surveys the politics of Britain, British life and Britain's place in the world. The column and blog are named after Walter Bagehot, an English journalist who was the editor of The Economist from 1861 to 1877. The blog is currently on hiatus after a change of Bagehot columnist.